


Season of the Inundation

by DachOsmin



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient Egypt, Gen, ToT: Monster Mash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 04:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8431153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DachOsmin/pseuds/DachOsmin
Summary: It started as all things do, on the banks of the Nile. The floods had come late to Luxor, as they had every year since the Calamity, and with them came a man and his boat.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ardentaislinn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ardentaislinn/gifts).



It started as all things do, on the banks of the Nile. The floods had come late to Luxor, as they had every year since the Calamity, and with them came a man and his boat.

The man was not from Luxor. He was not from anywhere. No one in the city knew him, nor did anyone in the city he had visited before, or the one before that. They all blurred together after a while, masses of sun baked brick and barley fields stretching up the river to the cataracts at Aswan, and back into his memory through years and years of wandering. Luxor was no different from any of the others, or it wouldn't have been, if the women hadn't tried to steal his boat.

***

"Steal" is a harsh word, but Horus-Sa was a harsh woman, he knew that much from the moment he first saw her. Her glare was a weapon enough; the bronze sword she brandished with her good arm was almost an afterthought, redundant.

"We're taking your boat," she said.

"Huh." The man glanced at her, took in her fine bronze armor, the regalia of the pharaoh's personal guard on her pectoral. Looked behind her, saw the rest of "We." Five dancing girls in linen shifts so fine they showed off every ripe curve and dimple, necks chained with beads of every gem under the sky, heads dwarfed by thick wigs and cones of perfumed fat barely melted by the baking sun. "Pharaoh's business?"

He heard rather than saw the dancing girls' fear in the shake of their jewelry as they whispered to one another. Only the first woman did not react, her gaze and sword steady. "Yes.”

"Huh," he said again. And made a move to step back onto his boat.

With a growl of frustration, she spun around, sheathing the sword and stepping towards the dancing girls. The man watched with raised eyebrows as she ripped a king's ransom in lapis lazuli and amethyst from their necks. She marched back to the boat and dropped the hoard into the bow in a clattered heap. "There. No stealing required. We are hiring your boat."

Even to a man that cared little for gold the pile was impressive, if only in its scale. "Going where?"

"For that much we could be going to the afterlife and back and we'd still be overpaying you."

He grunted, eyed her sword and the gold in equal measure, and waved the women onto the boat. The dancing girls skittered on first, followed by the warrior. She paused at the end of the dock. "My name is Horus-Sa, by the way."

"Huh."

She looked up at him. Her pale eyes stood out like turquoise amidst a mess of smudged kohl. "What's your name?"

"... Mhenkheperreseneb."

"Maka-?"

"Mhenkheperreseneb. The second."

She considered this, rolled the syllables around inside her mouth for a moment. "How about Max?"

***

They sailed through the afternoon and into the evening. Max made no comment as they sailed past the first village, nor did he remark at the second. When the lights of the third village faded into the ash clouds behind them, and it became clear that Horus-Sa meant to sail through the night, he finally turned to her.

"Hurrying."

She tightened the reed bolsters on the bow, not looking up. "Yes."

His eyes flickered upstream. "Someone behind you?"

"Yes."

He could tell from the line of her shoulders she was bracing. Waiting for him to ask who. He leaned back against the reeds of the bow and took a long sip of barley beer instead.

At length, she sighed and turned around, taking a moment to wipe the sweat from her brow. "You deserve to know, since you're on the boat with us."

One of the dancing girls hissed, her eyes narrowing into slits. "Don't tell-"

“The Pharaoh is behind us.”

Max considered this. "Lot of soldiers.”

Horus-Sa met his gaze and held it. “Does that bother you?”

Max looked past her, to where the dancing girls were huddled in the center of the boat. The pale one’s eye was purpled with a fading bruise beneath the perfect lines of her kohl. He looked back at Horus-Sa. “Only if they catch us,” he said, and began to row once more.

***

They sailed in silence all through the night, and most of the morning. When the ibis birds had taken to the afternoon skies and the heat of the day had settled over the river like a veil, Max asked where they were headed.

Horus-Sa, standing beside him with an oar in hand, was silent for a moment. “Home,” she finally said.

He raised an eyebrow. Looked at the pale gems of her eyes, the thinness of her hair. She was no daughter of the Nile, for all that its people had chained her and dressed her as one of their own.

She sighed. “Thera, if you know it.”

Max’s hands jerked, almost dropping his oar into the churning water below. His eyes darted downstream, to where the river vanished into the northern haze of ash. “No.”

“You don’t know it?”

He regained his grip on his oar before turning to face her. “Know it. Not going.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Do you know how much the gems I paid you are worth?”

He wouldn’t meet her eyes, instead staring fixedly at the clouds of ash on the northern horizon. “Not worth the open ocean in a reed boat. Not worth Thera.”

"Then I’ll buy your damn boat and sail it myself!"

"Sail it one handed?"

She bared her teeth at that, looking for all the world like an angry crocodile. "I am a child of Thera and my mother's daughter; I was born at the height of a winter storm in the very midst of the wine dark sea. I could toss you overboard and sail your damn boat with no hands."

He swallowed. The open sea would rip reed apart, make toothpicks of the thickest oars. And that was before the Calamity, before the ash had rolled in to choke the air and poison the wells of half of the Upper Kingdom and all of the Lower Kingdom. And yet. The ash roiled in the distance, but it paled before the fire in her eyes. He sighed. Made a placating gesture and reached for an oar. "We’ll sail it with three."

***

Towns gave way to ruins, the further north they traveled, closer and closer to the sea. The sky darkened to a rusted iron, sun a dull glint behind the roiling of the clouds. Few braved the North anymore: there were rarely other boats on the river.

They stopped in sleepy villages huddled in the delta backwaters, trading lapis hair beads for beer and bread where they could.

They sailed at night, when Hathor and Nut draped a veil of stars over the pillars of the sky. On cloudy evenings Horus-Sa navigated between herds of slumbering hippopotamuses and treacherous eddies by tasting the currents and listening to the sighs of the reeds.

On the tenth day, the delta fell away to surf. The few choked reeds that still grew were swallowed up by the tides of ash choked waters. The air grew pungent with salt, almost masking the burn of sulfur. They moored the boat on a lonely promontory where a town might once have stood, one last respite before braving the open ocean. As Max checked and double checked the reed lashings, he noticed the youngest of the dancing girls was crying, her hands trembling in prayer.

Max watched her for a moment until she noticed him; he turned, blushing, away. He walked to where Horus-Sa stood, scanning the horizon. Max, for his part, avoided the unyielding grey sky before them, instead glancing to the east and the west, where the barren shores stretched off into the distance. “Don’t have to go to Thera, you know” he said in a low murmur. “There are other cities.”

But Horus-Sa was shaking her head, stabbing her foot in the sand like an oath. “Not where they’d be safe. Not where Pharaoh wouldn’t find them.”

Max raised an eyebrow. The last living village had been a day and a half ago; there was nothing here but bones and a dying sky. “Think he’s still following?”

Horus-Sa’s eyes darted to the tallest of the dancing girls, the one with hair like molten amber. Her stomach, despite their meagre diet, had begun to curve with roundness. “He is.”

“Ah,” said Max. He turned back towards the boat, began to check the lashings for the third time. “Then we go on.”

***

The sea was calm at first, so calm that they could see the pharaoh’s fleet behind them when it finally burst from the delta. Tens of ships, each carved of sleek cedar, rowed by callused oarsmen and bristling with soldiers. Max swallowed, and wondered what the punishment would be for the man caught with the pharaoh’s finest dancing girls and fiercest guard. He rowed faster.

The water roughened by the hour, until the waves dwarfed the little reed boat, tossing it back and forth like a child’s toy. The ash whipped at their hair and faces, hiding the sky and the pharaoh’s flotilla behind a seething mask of grey. And then it began to rain.

“Should turn back.”

Horus-Sa wouldn’t look at him. “No.”

He tried again, raising his voice above the shrieking wind. “We’ll die out here!”

She whipped around, teeth bared. “Then we will die as free women!”

Max opened his mouth, to say what he didn’t know, when the sea around them began to boil and hiss. Something moved beneath the boat, almost swamping it. Max clung to the reeds of the stern for dear life. The noises from the water below grew louder and louder until they eclipsed the howling of the wind. And then, the waters split.

It was from the split that the serpent came. It was as tall as twenty men, with scales of gold and agate, eyes burning fire despite the sheets of rain beating down. It opened its mouth and when it spoke it sounded like screeching metal forced into the form of words. Max realized he was screaming and couldn’t stop.

“WHY HAVE YOU COME? NONE COME TO THE SEA ANYMORE.”

Horus-Sa knelt next to him, trying in vain to cover her ears. “We seek Thera, Sea Lord.”

THERA IS NO MORE,” the serpent said. “IT DIED IN FLAME AND WATER. A GREAT FIRE SLEPT BENEATH THE EARTH, AND WHEN IT WOKE IT SWALLOWED THE ISLAND WHOLE.”

“I don’t believe you!” Horus-Sa screamed into the storm. The rain lashed down around them, flooding the boat, sweeping away everything not tied down.

“HAVE YOU NOT SEEN THE ASH? HAVE YOU NOT SMELLED THE SMOKE?” The creature seemed to shrug. “BELIEVE WHAT YOU WISH. FOR I AM HUNGRY, AND THERE IS PRECIOUS LITTLE LEFT FOR ME TO EAT THESE DAYS.”

Max closed his eyes and tried to remember the prayers for the dying. He’d known them by heart lifetimes ago, when he last had people he cared enough to bury.

“Wait,” said a voice.

Max cracked an eye open. The tallest of the dancing girls stood on the bow, gazing steadily into the eyes of the serpent. Though the rain had lashed her hair into knots and plastered her linen shift to her skin she stood straight, every inch a queen. “I am Ankesanpepi,” she said, “the one they call Splendid. And I wish to barter with you.”

The serpent let out a cacophony of hissing that might have been laughter. “AND WHAT IS IT YOU WANT, ANKESANPEPI-CALLED-SPLENDID?”

Her gaze did not waver. “Safe passage to Thera.”

“I HAVE TOLD YOU: THERA IS NO MORE.”

“Thera-that-was, then. Or Thera-That-Still-Is, in another world.”

“YOU ASK MUCH.”

“I offer much.” There was a dark gleam in her eye. “An entire pharaoh’s army: a hundred-hundred soldiers, clad in bronze and iron, to guard your halls until the end of time.”

The serpent considered this. “A KINGLY OFFER. BUT IT IS NOT ENOUGH.”

Ankesanpepi thought for a moment, and then nodded to herself. She leaned down to grasp the treasure hoard of jewels that Horus-Sa had given Max in payment, and cast it out into the sea with a defiant swing of her arm. The amethyst and lapis beads glittered as they fell, disappearing into the sea one by one.

The monster hesitated, licking its lips as if tasting the king’s ransom in jewelry sinking into the watery depths of the sea. “THREE. THREE IS TRADITIONAL.”

Only then did Ankesanpepi hesitate. She turned back to look at the other girls, her eyes lingering on Horus-Sa most of all.

“It must be very lonely in your halls,” she finally said. “And I would warm them, if you would let me. I know the lays of Isis and Nephthys, I can sing the songs of the weaver and the harper. I can play the sistrum and the ney. I am told,” she said, and her voice finally wavered, “that I am very beautiful.”

The storm stilled for a moment as the serpent twisted its head. And then it nodded, and the waves came crashing back.

***

Everything after came in flashes: the nod of Ankesanpepi, not a gesture of defeat but the assent of a victorious queen. The driving of the rain, the distant beat of a hundred oars, and the drums that gave them their rhythm. The raw edged scream of Horus-Sa as Ankesanpepi stepped off the boat, into the roiling waters below. Raging lightning, seething ash. The sound of soldiers yelling, splintering wood. Darkness.

And after. On the horizon, bathed gold by the soft light of sunrise, a smudge of green.

Heart sick and weary, Max and Horus-Sa managed to pilot their battered craft closer, until the shore opened up before them, filling the horizon. Max could just make out the scent of honeysuckle, the warble of birds.

When the sea broke into clean white surf, the dancing girls jumped from the boat, weeping as they ran for the shore. The waves broke around their legs, sending up sea spray that sparkled in the light, a fine replacement for all the jewelry they had once worn. Horus-Sa watched them with a tired smile, while Max watched her.

He made no move to bring the boat any closer to the shore.

She finally turned to him, letting out a sigh. "Where do you plan to go?"

His found he couldn’t meet her eyes. "Punt. Nubia. Elsewhere."

She pointed true north, where the sun was cresting over the island, beneath the hammock of a clean blue sky. “Why not stay?

"Don't need me."

She reached out and rested her hands on his cheeks, so soft he almost spooked at her touch. “I don’t,” she agreed. “And yet.”

***

It ended as only myths do: with long sought peace, on the shores of an island that no longer exists in this world. It was the ninth year after the Calamity, and six figures walked inland under a swift sunrise. They left the boat behind.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween! I was inspired by your AU prompts and was doing a western desert thing that... somehow ended up in Egypt. Dunno how, exactly. 
> 
> This is not at all historically accurate! Not even a little bit! But Thera is a real island, and there was a terrible volcanic eruption there that had serious climatological repercussions on Egypt back in the day. Jury is out on the presence of capslock sea monsters though.


End file.
